Page 10 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

From across the casino came a crashing sound. Something had fallen over. Dani spun and caught a glimpse of a shape—a man. Tall, swift. Big guy.

“Let’s go.” She grabbed Mollie’s hand and pulled her through the restaurant.

“No—this way.” Mollie zigzagged in a new direction. “You look scared.”

“Nah.” Petrified. Dani broke into a jog.

“You’re cold. It’s bad, right?”

“We’re good. Faster.”

They shoved through the hotel doors, onto the street. The Strip lay in darkness.

Dani nearly stumbled from shock. The absence. The silence. Her feet kept moving.

“Oh,” Mollie said.

A shroud had fallen. Stillness, uselessness, a void. Dani felt a strange pressure in her chest. They needed to get back to the motel.

“You are scared.”

“Just… surprised.” She held tight to Mollie’s hand and began to hum.

Mollie hurried along beside her, quick small steps, her hand hot. “I know that song. Everybody who comes here sings it.”

“I bet.”

Bright light city gonna—

Out of the dark, headlights rose. A car, cruising, slowly.

Mollie slowed. “Somebody’s here!”

But Dani pulled her behind a hedge. The car neared—a BMW, its engine a silky rumble.

The driver was young, blond, with rock star hair kicking in the wind beneath a sequin-studded cowboy hat. Her hand was draped out the window, eyes scanning the street. Shadows filled the passenger seats. Static poured from the radio.

Dani swallowed. The static chewed the air.

“We don’t want to talk to them,” Mollie said. It wasn’t a question.

“Come on.” Dani pulled her away from the street.

Around four a.m., multiple engines roared up the street past the motel. Brakes squealed. Dani stole to the window. Heard screams.

At sunrise, while Mollie slept, she slipped out and crept up the block. Broken headlight glass. Blood in the gutter. Looked like somebody had been hit by a car.

A late-afternoon thunderstorm washed it away.

The day after, more people appeared. Healthy. Stunned. Blinking like baby birds. Numb. Or giddy and broken. A woman shambled past the motel in a red business suit and pearls, her Afro dusty.

“Wait here,” Dani told Mollie. “Don’t open the door unless it’s me.”

Her name was Sharon. She’d come to Vegas for a realtors’ convention. Her vacant expression suggested that her psyche had taken repeated shots from a Taser.

“Incredible inventory available now,” she said, and laughed, and began to weep.

Dani made comforting sounds, Calming-Dani sounds. The sun beat down. Then Sharon looked around. Weirdly. Expectantly.

She leaned in and lowered her voice. “It’s coming.”

“What is?” Rescue? A plague of frogs? Cher?

“It’ll be soon. Can’t you feel it?”

Dinnertime, Dani and Mollie found a mini-mart. The food in the fridge/freezer section was still chilled. Dani was grabbing cold cuts when, with an electric whoosh , a mobility scooter turned into the aisle.

It was the gambler—the woman from the slot machine at the airport. Cat-eye sunglasses, cigarette in her mouth. She stopped, and her glare convinced Dani she had a .22 in her purse.

Then, taking in Dani’s airline uniform, she softened. “Not the layover you had planned, is it?” She looked at Mollie. “Summer vacation, either.”

“I live here,” Mollie said.

“Same.” She stuck out her hand. “Eleanor.”

She was a court clerk. She had planned to fly to Louisville to ride out the superflu at her sister’s. But here she was.

Dani said, “You hear the cars last night?”

“Saw ’em.” Eleanor grabbed beef jerky from a rack, tore open the package, and wrestled a strip loose with her teeth. “Nasty business.”

“You’re calm,” Dani said.

“You too.”

“Calm and perky. I’ve trained for it.”

Eleanor shrugged. “Necessity’s a mother. TV’s fried, my soap’s off the air. I’ll never know which twin is carrying the archbishop’s secret baby.” Her shoulders dropped. “My poker group is dead.”

She looked away, then rallied and grabbed a second pack of jerky. “I’m pacing myself.”

“This store won’t last too long.”

Her face was in shadow. “Looters up and died, honey. It’s just us now.” She squinted out the door. “Us and them. ”

“You mean that young woman in the BMW? She listens to static. Like it’s calling to her.”

“Sounds about right.”

“What does she want? Everything you could desire is suddenly, freely, available.”

Eleanor’s expression sharpened. “?‘He who dies with the most toys wins.’ Well, keeping score with toys ain’t fun anymore. Makes her angry.” She pursed her lips. “The world burned, but she didn’t light the match, and that makes her angry, too. She don’t create—she inflicts . That’s what she wants.”

Dani stilled. “Sounds like you know who she is.”

“I’m a juvenile court clerk. She made multiple appearances.”

Dani urged Mollie to go find comic books and paperbacks. She edged closer to Eleanor. “Theft? Prostitution?”

“She’s a rich girl, not a street kid. She pulled the claws out of a kitten with pliers. Threw muriatic acid on a girl in school. Expected never to face consequences. And didn’t.”

“That’s… horrifying.” And alarming. A red-alert threat.

“Daddy’s lawyers got her community service. And then…” She waved her cig at the world. This happened . “Her name’s Amber. Think of her as… Amber waves of pain.”

She scanned the street, the maddened world that felt like a set of teeth coming at them.

“If you leave, don’t let anyone see you go. This place will fire back up, but till it does, Amber and her crew can set the rules, and declare your existence a crime they get to punish.”

Them —off-kilter, but finally finding their axis. One that spun toward night.

“Maybe it’s safer to stay.”

“It’s not. And forget the notion that Miss Mollie could stay here with me while you split. I ain’t up to it.”

Dani felt a brush of shame. She tried to hide it.

“When I say watch out,” Eleanor said, “I mean they’re putting bounties on folks who try to leave. Be careful who you tell, who sees you.”

“Bounties.”

She gripped Dani’s wrist. “Hear me, girl. Take care, ’cause people will snitch on you.”

Hiking back to the motel, a cold stone seemed to lodge in Dani’s throat. Amber was doing more than watching shit burn. She was prepping.

It’s coming. Soon. Can’t you feel it?

Something was inbound and Amber wanted to be ready for it. To have… offerings . Spoils that would prove her chops and buy her a place in a new power structure.

The next day Dani saw a spray-painted billboard. EXIT FEE = $10,000.

Her stomach knotted. Below that, on the wall of a building: OR UNTOUCHD YOUNG BLOOD TENDER.

Beneath that: OR ELSE.

On the dirt below lay the man who walked the Strip picking up litter. His trash-poking stick was stabbed into his neck like a whaling harpoon.

That night she and Mollie climbed to the roof of the Mirage. Distantly they saw a patrol on dirt bikes chasing down people in the desert. Headlights, circling, screams, gunfire.

Dani felt the impulse, visceral. Take wing.

Back in the oppressive heat of the motel room, she sat at the window eyeing the chittering night. She desperately missed Seattle. Mollie lay hard asleep in the moonlight.

Dani wasn’t her mother, her teacher, her social worker. She half thought that the girl looked up to her because she wore a uniform. A now funky, grime-streaked airline uniform. She needed to get the girl help. Shelter. Something. Something other than herself.

Covers rustled. Mollie sat up and hugged her knees, eyes dark. “You’re thinking about leaving, aren’t you?”

“No!” That was exactly what she was thinking. “I would never leave—”

“Because we can’t stay here. We have to go.”

We. “This is your home. I could stay, a while. See if help arrives. The power comes back on, phones. Don’t you want—”

“Staying isn’t safe.”

They stared at each other. Mollie seemed to vibrate with urgency.

“Then we leave,” Dani said.

In the morning, the first of July, they hit Big 5 Sporting Goods. They needed clothing, camping gear, bikes.

Weapons.

The store was cavernous, shadowy, a cornucopia. Aisle by aisle, they loaded a shopping cart. Then, rounding a display, a rustling noise stopped Dani cold.

In the HUNTING ARMS section, a young man was foraging behind the counter. Dark hair, broad shoulders. His T-shirt sported a great white shark. He spun and shined a flashlight in her face.

He’d beaten her to the guns. So far she’d only picked up a USMC tactical knife. She set her hand on it.

He aimed the flashlight at Mollie, and back. Kid and flight attendant. Killing the light, he spread his hands. “Startled me. We cool?”

Not a grown man—a teenager. Dani kept her hand on the knife.

Mollie stared with X-ray focus, then relaxed. “You were at the Desert Inn when the power went out.”

“That was you?” He lifted his chin, giving her an All right. “Those burgers smelled bitchin’.”

He hopped over the counter. “And we’re too late. The guns are cleaned out.”

A voice in Dani’s head said, Really? This kid was quick, agile, bright-eyed. His T-shirt said SANTA BARBARA SWIM CLUB . Dani kept her hand on the knife.

Mollie said, “Are you from California?”

“I was here with my team for a meet. I’m Jesse. Blackburn.”

Mollie touched a hand to her heart. “Mollie. Tajima.”

It clicked. Dani remembered. “The bus. ‘Santa Barbara School District.’ It was—”

“Somebody hit us,” Jesse said. “The bus driver was sick, couldn’t hold it. We flipped onto a VW, crushed it…” He looked pained.

“Hit you?”

“Deliberately.” His expression darkened. “Some girl. In a BMW. Driving down the road sideswiping people.”

A chill scissored down Dani’s back. “Was she wearing a spangled cowboy hat?”

“Yeah. Huge hair. Like the singer from Poison.”

Amber.

Mollie looked up at Jesse. “Are you going home?”

He paused. “That’s my plan.”

Snitch.

Snitch—don’t let him out of here.

“Across the desert?” Dani said. “How?”

“Dirt bike, if I can get gas. Otherwise…” He jerked a thumb at the mountain bikes.

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”